Politics

Harris Touts Prosecutorial Record As Readiness For Trump, Which Makes Me Queasy

She's leaning into her record... good luck with that.

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Senator Kamala Harris (Photo by NOAH BERGER/AFP/Getty Images)

I’m not going to lie, I had hoped Kamala Harris would make this easier for me. I had hoped she would distance herself from her prosecutorial record as “I did the job I was assigned to do, well.” I had hoped she would blunt criticism over what doing that job entailed by proposing bold new policies to fix all that is broken with our criminal justice system. I had hoped she’d lean into her Senatorial career, and not her prosecutorial background. I hoped she’d be out here like Julián Castro, and draw a more clear distinction between would-be President Harris versus Attorney General Harris.

I wanted it to be one way, but Harris says it’s the other way. In a speech last weekend in front of the NAACP of South Carolina, Harris leaned all the way the hell into her prosecutorial record. From the New York Times:

“There have been those who have questioned my motivations, my beliefs and what I’ve done,” Ms. Harris said in a speech in South Carolina. “But my mother used to say, ‘Don’t let people tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.’ So that’s what I’m going to do.”

In the speech, Ms. Harris cast herself as a change agent from within the system.

“It matters who is in those rooms,” she said. “I demanded we reject the false choice that said you’re either tough on crime or soft on crime. Instead, I said we must be smart on crime.”

Yes, it matters a great deal who is in those rooms. The problem is that Harris has not really established why I should want her in those rooms. She hasn’t established that, when issues of large scale criminal justice reform come up, she’s gong to be on the correct side. She hasn’t established that she’s going to aggressively address prosecutorial misconduct, broken windows policing, junk science, or police and prosecutorial transparency. And she hasn’t at all sold me on her truancy initiative. A simple “I was wrong to threaten poor, working mothers with jail time” would really be appreciated at some point.

And I say that as a person who thinks the “Kamala the cop” attacks are horseshit. I think people who mindlessly repeat that nonsense are having their minds colonized by Russian trolls. She was a prosecutor. She tried, I believe, to protect the public safety and bring justice to the victims of crime as she thought best. Not all prosecutors are “bad,” but they all have the power to do incredibly bad things. We simply must be smart enough to live in a world where we can distinguish people based on their views and not merely their job titles.

Being able to prosecute wrongdoers could be an asset in a presidential candidate, especially one who seeks to replace the most corrupt president in American history. Harris tried to make that turn (finally) in her speech last weekend:

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In South Carolina, where Ms. Harris has appeared at more campaign events than any other Democratic candidate has, she received a rousing ovation whenever she assailed the president.

The voters she was courting are also being wooed by former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic front-runner at this early stage. Part of her goal was to show she can best argue the case against Mr. Trump.

“We’ve got to hold this guy accountable by prosecuting the case in front of the American people against four more years of this administration,” Ms. Harris said to applause. “I’ve prosecuted a lot of cases. But rarely one with this much evidence.”

See… man… the Trump adversary in me says, “Hell yes, prosecute him straight to hell.” But the criminal justice reformer in me says, “Hell yes, wait, hold up, what do you mean by ‘rarely one with this much evidence’? Jesus Christ, how many people are directly in jail because of you? Has the Innocence Project looked into this?” The very LAST thing I want to hear a former prosecutor snark about is how much evidence she needs.

The fact that the California Innocence Project is NOT out here stanning for Senator Harris is a huge gaping maw of a problem. Yes, we need someone able to hound Trump to the ends of the Earth after he leaves office. But we also need someone who is going to FREE innocent people. Harris seems like the opposite of that.

Harris’s remarks went over very well with the older black crowd of NAACP goers in South Carolina. Which, while maybe not a “bug,” is not necessarily a “feature” in her favor. Older black people are just like old people everywhere. And so they get a little unruly and excited by law and order and keeping those kids with their low-hanging pants and rap music the hell off their lawn. And then there’s the layer of chronic underservice by law enforcement and racist service by the law enforcement that does eventually show up that results in black communities suffering the brunt of crime. You put it all together and it’s just not hard to get an audience to cheer your applause line of getting “smart” on crime. An older black audience is a friendlier room for “not demonstrably racist policing” than Twitter might lead you to believe.

My problem is that I don’t know what “smart” on crime means when Harris says it. Does it mean she’s going to try to get rid of qualified immunity, which protects officers personally when they commit crimes in the line of duty? Does it mean she’s going to ask for federal review of every officer-involved shooting, as Castro has proposed? Does it mean she’s going to prosecute prosecutors — like, I don’t know, Linda Fairstein — when it’s clear that their abuse of power has led to wrongful convictions? “Smart on crime” sounds great. So does “clean coal” and “compassionate conservative” and “to infinity and beyond.” Now tell me what that means.

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I love… Maya Harris. Kamala Harris’s younger sister, Maya Harris, was the head of the Northern California ACLU before she took a senior role in her sister’s campaign. Maya Harris’s record on crime and justice is nigh unimpeachable. She’s realer than me or nearly anybody else who questions Kamala’s commitment to this issue. If the Harris sisters morphed their records into one record, I wouldn’t even be the one to point out the sleight of hand.

But Kamala Harris isn’t going that route. Instead she wants us to believe that a hard-nose prosecutor is exactly the experience we need to take out Trump. That’s not a bad argument. She’s just not making it an easy one for me to swallow.

Kamala Harris, Seeking a Campaign Jolt, Defends Record as Prosecutor [New York Times]

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